Recipe 7 - Funnel Conversion Priority: Find the Business That Is Actually Going to Close

Find the Business That Is Actually Going to Close

From The Spiral Sales Office Recipe Vault | By Paul Woodley

A full funnel and a healthy funnel are not the same thing. Most hotel sales offices carry pipeline that looks reassuring on paper and quietly stalls in practice. Opportunities sit in Tentative status for sixty days past their decision date. Leads with no follow-up activity in three weeks hold up forecast numbers they no longer deserve.

Recipe 7 is the prompt that separates the real pipeline from the comforting fiction. It tells you which opportunities are actually moving, which are stalling, and whether what you have in the funnel is genuinely sufficient to close the gap to goal.

What This Recipe Makes

A prioritised, actionable read on your group sales pipeline that identifies stalled business, ranks closing opportunities, calculates your pace deficit, and produces a one-paragraph health summary you can use with your GM.

• Head Chef: DOSM, before every funnel review
• When to Cook It: Biweekly, before the funnel review call
• Ingredients: Funnel and pipeline export with stage, projected room nights and revenue, decision date, days in current status, and booking-status code if captured

The Booking Status Key

If your sales system carries a numbered booking status field, this prompt uses a standard four-level key to interpret it:

• Status 1 - Contracted or contracting. Effectively definite. Should be moving into on-the-books, not sitting in the funnel
• Status 2 - Hot lead. All hands on deck. Forecastable as a named entry with a decision date and an owner
• Status 3 - Fifty-fifty. Still shopping the market. Only forecastable at a probability-weighted value where a decision date exists
• Status 4 - New lead, follow-up needed. Pipeline only. Do not carry a dollar of it into the forecast

Most funnel reviews treat all pipeline as roughly equivalent. This prompt does not. The distinction between a status two opportunity and a status four opportunity is the difference between a forecastable revenue assumption and a hope.

The Five Outputs This Prompt Returns

1. Total Pipeline Value by Stage and Status - With historical conversion rates at each level if you can provide them. What looks like a healthy funnel may be ninety percent status three and four, which is a very different picture
2. Stalled Opportunities - Every opportunity where days in current status is unusually high relative to its stage. These are the deals quietly decaying while the volume number stays intact
3. The Five Opportunities Most Likely to Close This Month - Ranked by priority for personal follow-up, using stage, status number, decision date, and revenue size. Your call list, built from the data rather than instinct
4. Your Pace Deficit and Coverage Test - The team need for the period minus status one and two totals, and whether the status three pipeline is large enough to close that gap at your historical conversion rate. If the answer is no, the prompt says so directly
5. A One-Paragraph Pipeline Health Summary - Written for your GM, in plain language, honest about what the funnel contains and what it means for the period

The Number That Changes the Conversation

The pace deficit calculation is the most important output in this prompt, and the one most often skipped in funnel reviews.

The pace deficit is your team's remaining goal for the period minus the value of status one and two opportunities. It tells you how much revenue is genuinely at risk of not closing, rather than how much revenue exists somewhere in a pipeline report. A funnel review that does not calculate this number is a review of volume, not a review of probability.

When you present the pace deficit alongside the coverage test, the conversation shifts from how is the funnel looking to whether the funnel is sufficient to meet the commitment. Those are very different conversations, and only one of them produces action.

Where the Output Goes

The biweekly funnel review agenda. Your own personal follow-up list for the week. Agenda item seven of the monthly critique. The input to Recipe 26, which matches pipeline opportunities to the right collateral and promotions to help them close.

The Mirror

Look at your current funnel. How many of the opportunities in it have not had a logged activity in the last ten days? What is the total dollar value of that stalled pipeline? If you do not know that number, you are managing volume, not pipeline. Recipe 7 tells you the number.

A Note on Data Handling

Confirm what your employer, owner, brand, and management company permit before pasting property data into any AI platform. Pipeline data with account names, revenue projections, and decision dates may be commercially sensitive. When in doubt, remove account names and use generic identifiers. Every output is a starting position. The judgment and the close still belong to you.

Your Next Step

Export your pipeline before your next funnel review. Run Recipe 7. Walk into the review knowing which five deals need your personal attention this week, what your real pace deficit is, and whether your coverage test passes. Then lead the meeting from that position instead of discovering the answers during it.

Paul Woodley | The Spiral Sales Office